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You’ll struggle to find a vision of purgatory quite so wretched as Samuel Beckett’s 1961 novel How It Is. Written in three parts, and entirely without punctuation, it’s the tale of a man crawling through endless mud, clutching a sack of tinned food, “dying in a dying age”.

In part two things perk up, when he meets another man and stabs him in the buttocks with a tin-opener. But in part one he endures eventless solitude, occasionally interrupted by the brief “images” (not memories, nor dreams) he has of a better life elsewhere. “Deterioration of the sense of humour”, our hero notes at one point, “fewer tears too”. It makes Waiting for Godot look positively upbeat.

But if there’s anyone who can unearth the humour and the tears, it’s Ireland’s Gare St Lazare. The husband-and-wife company (actor Conor Lovett and director Judy Hegarty Lovett) last visited the Print Room in 2016 with a brilliant mini-festival of Beckett’s early prose.

For this staged version of part one, they are joined by the reliably excellent Stephen Dillane (Game of Thrones, The Crown) for what is their most ambitious production yet, one which sets aside their usual minimalist approach for a sound-and-lights extravaganza. The technical tricks aren’t always well judged; the sound of sirens, in particular, is more distracting than evocative. But the use of the theatre space is ingenious. The audience sit onstage, watching the actors stalk the artfully lit stalls and balcony, while the Print Room’s peeling wallpaper makes an ideal backdrop for Beckett’s elegant images of decay.

Credit:
Tristram Kenton

There is no attempt to represent the action directly, so we’re spared the sight of Dillane smeared with “s--- and vomit” lugging tins of sardines. Instead, this show is an exploration of the human voice as it journeys from confusion towards clarity.

It begins with Lovett in the stalls, reading flatly from a copy of the book, as if for the first time. At first he’s almost drowned out by a taped, distorted voice reading the same lines, but as he moves to the stage, his performance becomes clearer and, as he turns to face us, it takes on humour and warmth.

He’s echoed by an offstage Dillane; they later trade places, their voices overlapping. As Beckett once explained in a letter, the book’s protagonist isn’t narrating so much as “murmuring his ‘life’ as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him”. Both actors are at once speaker and listener, echoing one other. Lovett is tentative, thoughtful; Dillane assertive, schoolmasterly. Lovett brings the pathos, Dillane the laughs. We come to relish small details. One painstaking description of pulling a tin from the sack becomes a comic tour-de-force. Even in hell, it seems, “there are moments they are good moments”.